I've been getting warnings about running out of space in my free Google account for months. I've already deleted messages with obviously large attachments, but that only goes so far when you have tens of thousands of emails that have smaller attachments.

So I did a search today for

is:unread before:2021/01/01

which yielded about 72,000 messages. I figured anything that old that I had not read would in fact NEVER get read, and therefore decided to just delete all of it without even looking. The operation took several minutes, after which I had to actually empty the trash to see the results.

No regrets!

You’re a braver man than I. I would worry about that one important message I may have missed.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

You've left a number of Nigerian princes very disappointed.

I would worry about that one important message I may have missed.


POMTL!

I have a couple G-mail accounts that I haven't checked in a decade, at least, and don't remember the passwords.

I'm sure there are that many emails in at least one of them.

There is no motivation to move me to clean them up.

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I am that Masked Man.

All you can do, is all you can do.

There’s trouble — it's time to play the sound of my people.

Your boos mean nothing to me, I've seen what you cheer for.

Insisting on your rights without acknowledging your responsibilities isn’t freedom, it’s adolescence.

I've been to the edge of the map, and there be monsters.

We are a government of laws, not men.

Everybody counts or nobody counts.

When a good man is hurt,
all who would be called good
must suffer with him.

You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

There is no safety for honest men except
by believing all possible evil of evil men.

We don’t do focus groups. They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products. —Sir Jonathan Ive

An armed society is a polite society.
And hope is a lousy defense.

You make me pull, I'll put you down.

I *love* SIGs. It's Glocks I hate.

Quote
Speedy
You’re a braver man than I. I would worry about that one important message I may have missed.

Well, last year sometime I did download the entire dataset for my Google ID, so I technically still have them... somewhere.

Still, I figure if I had missed anything important for more than 12 months somebody would have let me know by now through some other means.

I have something like 150k unread in my junk address. But I bought some space.

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Hurts like a bastid...

I did that recently. Dunno how many, but my "usage" is like 3% now.
I did keep the Nigerian Princesses.

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!#$@@$#!

never do yesterday or today what you can put off til tomorrow or next year.

Am I the only weirdo who practices Inbox Zero?

I'm keep my emails down to the couple hundred range. But I'm also meticulous about grabbing any important info from any email and putting it into some other form. It's a weekly to-do but it helps with the way my brain is wired.

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M1 2020 Mac mini (16G 2T) • Sonoma 14.x • Dual 27" Dell S2722QC monitors • M2 2022 13" MBAir (512G 16G) •

Quote
tuqqer
Am I the only weirdo who practices Inbox Zero?

I'm keep my emails down to the couple hundred range. But I'm also meticulous about grabbing any important info from any email and putting it into some other form. It's a weekly to-do but it helps with the way my brain is wired.

I do zero inbox daily. I've always done it at work and home. I get a couple hundred emails a day and in the morning I open gmail, select 50, scan down, deselect those I care about and trash the rest, rinse and repeat until they're gone. I read and either file or trash the rest. Every month or so I unsubscribe/report spam on a bunch. I have trashed emails I need on occasion and have had to get them back from the trash. I'm sure I've lost some important emails, as well, without recovering them, but life has gone on so perhaps they weren't that important.

I try to keep my inbox under 20 messages. Stays if it’s actionable or if I need to reference it soon. I would like to be zero inbox but that’s as close as I can get. I do have some folders where I file away things like receipts or things I may need to reference back to in a future time.

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Ukulele music I couldn't find anywhere else.
[colquhoun.info]

Quote
davemchine
I try to keep my inbox under 20 messages. Stays if it’s actionable or if I need to reference it soon. I would like to be zero inbox but that’s as close as I can get. I do have some folders where I file away things like receipts or things I may need to reference back to in a future time.

Yeah, same here. For me, I think the zero is more the direction to head for, instead of the goal.

All my emails (5) go through Apple Mail, so I have a couple of Smart Mailboxes set up. This allows me to "delete" with abandon, since it all goes to Trash, and those don't get truly deleted until I run some of the Smart Mailboxes. Ones like All Attachments, Older than 18 months, All Subscription. All of these search the Trash folder, to help keep it light and fairly clean of clutter. The All Attachments is especially handy, since it can be viewed by size and quickly find any attachment over 500k to be quickly deleted en masse.

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M1 2020 Mac mini (16G 2T) • Sonoma 14.x • Dual 27" Dell S2722QC monitors • M2 2022 13" MBAir (512G 16G) •

When I got the message it struck me as just Google trying to upsell.

I try to keep to <75.
I'm failing

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!#$@@$#!

never do yesterday or today what you can put off til tomorrow or next year.

My brain kept telling me that in the past my sent folder automatically deleted mail older than a certain date. A google search says yes that did used to be the case. Apple removed that feature with the introduction of Sierra. One person theorized it was removed at the same time the (cursed) conversation view was introduced to minimize confusion. There doesn't seem to be a work around. Either manually delete sent mail periodically or setup a rule to delete it (but it has to be manually started to work on a non-inbox folder).

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Ukulele music I couldn't find anywhere else.
[colquhoun.info]

Oh I'm totally zero-inbox in case that was not clear, but only in the Primary folder.

The messages that were unread lived in the Social and Promotions folders. I rarely find any of those items to be important so I don't even bother looking there. Messages in those folders do not appear in the main Inbox counter of unread items.

Quote
RgrF
When I got the message it struck me as just Google trying to upsell.

Agree. However being rather stingy as usual I took it as a personal challenge to not spend money on this problem right now.